I was asked by Ben Brangwyn of Transition Towns to evaluate WiserEarth.org as a potential software platform for Transition Towns:

Here are my comments:

My perspective:

I must declare that I am not completely objective. My views on this have been developed in my book, eGaia, through the Open Co-op, and especially, on this portal, which seems likely to be used for several East Anglian Transition Towns, including Diss, Bungay and Norwich.

However, my commitment is not to any particular software platform, but rather to the vision of a collaborative, sustainable Earth, for which I see online communication as supporting infrastructure. The overall image is of people collaborating, forming partnerships to look after each other and the Earth, rather than competing against one another in a global marketplace: Planetary Citizenship, a global co-operative green economy, rather than a competitive globalised market dominated by small numbers of large corporations.

In looking at WiserEarth, I am not going for a definitive judgement, but rather using it to help clarify my own ideas as to what a software platform could offer this vision, and in particular, to the Transition Towns movement, and offer this article in that spirit.

First impressions of WiserEarth

I tried exploring WiserEarth by simply browsing around, and then created an account for myself to see what difference that made.

The first thing I noticed is the amazingly comprehensive set of organisations included, over 100,000 of them. (Compared to only 16,000 users.) They can be searched by name, location or map and ‘recency’, and also areas of interest and links to other organisations. This is a great resource.

• The site is very easy to use. I never got stuck. There are lots of nice little details, showing how much attention has been paid to usability. I liked the universal use of photos to identify people (with a set of non-photographic alternatives), the very simple personal profile page, the inclusion of map references.
• All (or most?) pages allow comments to be posted, and for a logged in user, the comment template is there waiting for you with your photo and the editor.
• Most pages allow multiple contributors and there is always a set of photos of those that have contributed, linked to their personal page on the site.
• The built in editor for creating content is quite fully featured, including media and perhaps too many style options.
• The search facility (a key usability item) is good with a choice of areas to search in.

Socially, the site is clearly well-used. There is no way of telling how many people are active users, but in terms of monitoring content, there are 57 people with editor status and 8 with administrator status. That is a lot of people looking after the site, not just using it. Despite this, a fair amount of spam clearly gets through.

There are 3 categories of ‘user’: people (who have accounts on WiserEarth), organisations (meaning existing, external organisations), groups (made up of WiserEarth users). Each has their own area, with a range of facilities, including an ‘about’ section, map, wiki pages, events, jobs, resources. The ‘home’ page for each is a portal referencing all of these, and also including links to areas of focus. Content created can be public or restricted to group members. This is a very useful feture.

There is the possibility of discussions either through comments on any item, or through a separate set of discussions. I couldn’t tell whether you get notified by email of new items in areas of interest to you, or whether you have to browse through the site to check.

Overall, the presentation and design is very clear and very slick and shows a lot of work put into it.

However, I experienced the whole site as a large anonymous city, in which there is a lot of interesting stuff to find, but not at all like a cosy home or intimate meeting place where I would like to hang out with my friends.

The role of WiserEarth software for Transition Towns

If Transition Towns wants to use WiserEarth as a platform there are several ways in which this could be done:

1. We could simply colonise the existing WiserEarth site, creating organisational areas for national and local groups, and adding group areas for common interest groups.
2. We could use the WiserEarth software for our own global TT website:
   ”WiserPlatform is PHP5, MySQL 4+ web application written with Symfony. It can be used to create web sites that manage complex relationships between different entity types. It includes built-in social networking and groupware functionality.”
3. We could use many instances of the software, say for each national or regional grouping and also for every local town that wanted it.

The first option has the advantage that we would be linked to a vast number of other relevant organisations. However, I don’t know if many of them actually use it as their working websites. It is more like a resource than a home. However, I think there should be a TT presence on WiserEarth.

The second option has similar problems. Transition Towns is already too big and diverse for a single website.  There are already very many TTs with their own websites, and each has its own look and feel that makes it home to that group. Moreover the needs of a local town and of a national site are quite different.

That leaves the third option, which would enable any TT that wants it to create a new site that would probably be a lot richer than the one they already have, should they wish to do so. It would enable us to set up sites for regional clusters and national networks, each with their own character, catering for the different needs at different scales.

However, this doesn’t address the issues of communication between the many individual sites, and I couldn’t find anything in WiserEarth that would facilitate that. This is a major issue we need to address.

I think one of our key requirements is to allow different towns, regions, national groups, etc. the ability to create portals that feel personal/home, to them while linking to the others that are likely to be of relevance.

What is missing from WiserEarth

WiserEarth is an excellent social networking site, with great usability and many features linking the groups that use it. It has a lot to teach us. It is quite possible that it could act as a starting point for additional development, either by Transition Towns or by its existing developers, or both.

Much of what we need is as much social as technical. Just as WiserEarth has a large contingent of people acting as editors and administrators, Transition Towns needs a large contingent of people taking responsibility to co-ordinate at different levels: within each local group and its constituent sub-groups, between neighbouring groups in a region or city, nationally and transnationally.

These people need to be looking after the sense of sense of identity and associated policy at the various scales, at the need to keep an eye on quality, performance and handle conflicts, to plan in the light of changing external conditions, and to facilitate synergy between the relevant sub-groups at their level. We need to clarify all of this, establish procedures for it, and then ensure that the communication platform we develop supports them.

This type of co-ordination will require sub-groups with discussions, group-editable pages and links to one another, all of which WiserEarth can provide. Polling facilities will also be crucial. I’m not sure if they are already there, but wouldn’t be hard to add.

Finally, there is one major area that I am convinced is the key to a sustainable future, and that is an exchange or collaborative trading system.  At the local level of a Transition Town or neighbourhood, it will be a place that you use to find out the availability of local food, shared transport, ways to save energy, childcare, jobs needing doing, help needed, on a daily basis. It will link all the TT working groups for the benefit of all. The community portal that supports this will become at least as well used as email (and like email, needs good support for the less computer-able in the community). I don’t know of any existing software platform that supports that. It will need to be developed.

To summarise, the two major areas for further development are communication links between different groups at different scales, often on separate web portals, and this exchange system to create a locally-based, but regionally and globally connected collaborative economy.